Games you can play free — and legally

There's a genuinely huge amount of great gaming that costs nothing and is completely above-board. Here's where to find it, roughly in order of "best bang for no buck."

Free games you get to keep

• Weekly store giveaways — the Epic Games Store gives away paid games every week, and GOG, Steam, Amazon Prime Gaming and Ubisoft run regular free offers too. Claim them and they're yours permanently, no strings.
• Great free-to-play titles — many of the most-played games in the world are free: team shooters, battle royales, big MOBAs, card games and MMOs. Optional cosmetics fund them; you never have to spend to play.
• Free indie games on itch.io — a deep well of inventive, often experimental games released free by their creators, from tiny jam games to polished gems.

Play right now in your browser

• Modern browser games — itch.io and Newgrounds host thousands that run in a tab, nothing to install.
• The classics, legally — the Internet Archive lets you play thousands of MS-DOS and arcade classics in the browser, free and legal, plus there are open-source remakes of many old favourites.
• Puzzle and board games — a whole genre of free daily puzzles lives on the web now, and lichess is a completely free, ad-free place to play chess against people or the computer.

Free, open-source games worth installing

Not tie-ins or trials — full games, made by their communities and free forever:

• 0 A.D. — a gorgeous historical real-time strategy game, in the Age of Empires mould.
• OpenTTD — the open-source remake of Transport Tycoon; endlessly replayable.
• Battle for Wesnoth — a deep turn-based fantasy strategy game with a huge campaign library.
• SuperTuxKart — a fun kart racer, great for playing with kids.

Cheap and legitimate, when you do want to buy

• Store sales & wishlists — Steam, GOG and the rest discount deeply and often; wishlist a game and you'll be told when it drops.
• Subscription libraries — the platform makers' game passes give you a big rotating catalogue for a flat monthly fee, cancel anytime.
• DRM-free from GOG — buy it, download it, it's yours to keep offline.

One honest note: skip "download the full game free" sites and cracked torrents — they're the classic route to malware, and the free options above are better anyway.